What You Must Know To Build Savvy Push Notifications

With a few missteps, a push notification can transform from invitation to intrusion. Here, Noah Weiss, Slack's Head of Search, Learning and Intelligence, maps out the history and machinery behind push notifications — and the principles that can help startups use them well.

Outline

Smartphones have been around for nearly a decade and yet founders still declare mobile the most underhyped technology, according to First Round's State of Startups Survey. And, within mobile, the potential of push notifications reigns supreme. Entrepreneur Ariel Seidman captures this well: “It’s hard to over-hype the power of mobile push notifications. For the first time in human history, you can tap almost two billion people on the shoulder.”

That’s why Slack's Noah Weiss is a true believer in a world coming closer together through smarter pings.

Before Slack, Weiss worked at Foursquare when it monetized the service with native ads and boldly split into two apps in 2014. During that time, monthly active users more than quintupled.

In this interview, Weiss maps out the dynamic evolution of push notifications — revealing critical paradigm shifts in the era of smartwatches and app-filled homescreens. Here, he also shares tips for startups seeking to build out their push notification strategy and the inputs, metrics, and guidelines to instate.

A great push notification is three things: timely, personal and actionable.

Evolution of Push Notifications

Before sharing tactics, Weiss summarizes the evolution of push notifications as it relates to the three qualities that make pings powerful: being timely, personal and actionable. He sees their history and progression as fundamental context to consider as you build your future strategy. Here’s an abridged four-stage history:

Email As the Push Notification Predecessor. The push notification of the early web era was email. “There are a lot of similar analogs between email and push,” says Weiss.

Migration to Mobile. Email started to falter as users engaged more on their mobile phones.

Competing with SMS, not Email. On mobile, push notifications are more akin to texts than emails.

Cutting through all the apps. When people first adopted smartphones, their apps could fit in a 4x4 grid on their home screen.

Build Your Notification Strategy Around These Tenets

An in-depth notification strategy can weigh and weave together several factors, such as nearby wifi, personalization, social factors and real-time snapping to places to power its push notifications.

Boost retention outside the app.

From a user retention standpoint, there are diminishing returns after your app crosses a threshold of functionality.

Customer acquisition propels an app. User retention builds a business.

Don’t mistake a download with permission.

Asking for the authority to send notifications is not only good form, but technologically necessary.

Nail down three metrics to measure notifications...

To assess your notification strategy, nail down three metrics: 1) the rate of users opting out of your notification permissions, 2) the uninstall rate and 3) actions per hundred pings.

...but calibrate them to compare performance on iOS and Android.

For those that want to track open rates as a metric, Weiss has a few observations about the nature of notifications on different operating systems.

Fill your notifications with personalized tidbits, so they sound like they came from a close friend.

Counteract the novelty effect.

Run experiments with notifications for a minimum of six weeks but 12 weeks is a good sweet spot.

Experiment with how, when and where.

The “why” and “who” behind push notifications is often more straightforward — the goal is to increase engagement among all users. However, there’s a diversity of thought on the way in which pings should be released.

Resort to vibration for only the most urgent of pings.
Match users’ biorhythms.
Use variety of personalization in your copy.
Think of your ping as an Uber.

The Future of Notifications

Smartphone and smartwatch screens will keep changing, but the real estate of home screens will always be finite regardless of the size.

Make the lockscreen the new home screen.

Enrich contextual awareness.

The best apps will be the ones you don’t have to remember to use. They’ll remind you.

Bringing it All Together

While notifications are great for boosting retention and engagement rates, don’t start off by looking at them as a growth hacking tool. They have the potential to be the most intuitive and intimate way to interact with your users. In order to build that trustworthy relationship, they must be timely, personal and actionable. A notification strategy must ask permission from users and be measured by their opt-outs, uninstalls, and actions per 100 pings. The more that notifications can be customized actively via user input and passively through contextual awareness, the better.